Tuesday, April 25, 2017

On French elections

Comment by a comrade on Facebook:

There was no one to vote for in the first round, and there will be nobody to vote for in the second round! Lots will get sucked into "voting against Le Pen." But it's either a working class vote (and there's no genuine workers candidate in any sense of the term), or a vote for capitalism. It's not who you're against, it's what you're for. If Macron wins, it will be Le Pen next time, since there are no capitalist solutions.

And a note:

Unlike Trump, Le Pen has fascist credentials, although she's been moving her party to the center-right. But fascism is not merely an electoral party, it's a mass movement of the middle classes, using lumpen elements as it's battering ram, against the trade unions and workers parties. It's a movement for saving capitalism masked in anti-capitalist rhetoric.

In relationship to the government, fascism conquers peacefully, but in relationship to the working class, Jews and other scapegoated elements it uses intense violence before it comes to power. We're not seeing anything like this in France today.